Bill Winkler

If you had told Bill Winkler in high school that someday he’d be a senior executive running an international advertising agency, he probably would have just laughed. That year, Bill held off on college, working at a job fixing flat tires on trucks and tractors, not sure of what he wanted to do with his life.

But he learned something important between working on all those tires: he wanted to use his brain to make money. So he went to college, washing dishes to earn money along the way, and after graduating he took a job at a national CPA firm. That’s when things got interesting.

“I realized I wanted to change from public accounting to private, and took a job with a small regional advertising agency in Oklahoma,” Bill says. Over the course of 25 years, the small company grew into a national and international advertising agency. Bill’s training as a CPA played a big role in helping the company grow. “Without my accounting, finance and management background, we couldn’t have grown effectively,” Bill says.